The Air Up is a hydration gadget that smells at you. The water bottle is rather like many different water bottles aside from a despair across the gap the place the water comes out. It’s right here, across the spout, that you simply snap in a ring-shaped pod infused with a fruity scent. Then, if you take a swig, you additionally take a sniff. The sensations of style and odor are commingled sufficient to trick your mind into pondering you’re sipping fruit-flavored water, though the scent puck by no means really flavors the water inside.
Should you’ve been on Instagram not too long ago, you might have seen one of many 6 billion sponsored adverts for the Air Up. If these adverts have made you interested in it, let me prevent some money and time: You may simply recreate the Air Up expertise by sipping some water whereas huffing a lemon-scented Glade Plug-In.
Scent Ya Later
The bottles are available in three sizes (16, 22, and 28 ounces), and also you get a selection between a tough plastic or insulated metallic shell. Every bottle prices between $40 and $65, and a few odor pods are included along with your first buy. Further pods are available in packages of three that price between $8 and $13 every. That is all very costly. Sometimes, you should buy a very good water bottle for between $20 and $35.
Air Up’s central shtick is its “patented Scentaste know-how.” It’s based mostly on a neurological phenomenon known as retronasal olfaction, which refers to how scent impacts the notion of style at the back of the mouth. You might have heard the axiom that odor is 80 to 90 % of style. It’s not technically true, however there’s something to the thought, in keeping with Donald Katz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis College in Massachusetts who researches the interaction between scent and style. He says the science Air Up cites is legitimate.
“Style and odor are so intimately related that analysis in my lab means that we’re making a mistake pondering of them as two separate techniques,” Katz says.
Air Up is raring to play with that connection. You load the Air Up like so: Pour common unflavored water into the bottle, then connect a silicone lid with a straw threaded by way of the center and a round indent operating across the straw. Place one in every of Air Ups’s proprietary scent pucks excessive of the straw, slide it down, and match it into the rubbery groove within the lid. Once you drink by way of the straw, the in any other case flavorless water will probably be supplemented by the simultaneous odor hitting your nostril, tricking your mind into “tasting” the flavour you’re smelling.
That’s the thought, anyway.
Retronasal olfaction can closely affect how one thing tastes. In experiments, Katz says that altering the scent somebody inhales whereas consuming can change how they understand the flavour, even when the stuff of their mouth is in any other case precisely the identical. However whereas scent is a big a part of style, it isn’t a substitute for it.
“Scent modifications style, however style is not simply no matter odor tells it,” Katz says. “You may stuff as a lot raspberry up your nostril as you need, that is not going to make you style raspberry.”
{Photograph}: Air Up
